Hope to Die (Super Dangan Ronpa 2: Goodbye Despair one-shot)
by TheParasiticComplex
Summary: Rated Kplus for morbid discussion. Nagito speaks death. Hajime fears and agrees. An emotive read, short but with plentiful description. Based on the English voice-acting and game-play. Reviews appreciated and heeded.


Cool nocturnal winds ghosted over the pearlescent sand. Waves smoothly inched up the beach akin to a dynamic carpet of shattered sapphires. Clouds toiled overhead, cloaking the moon in a dusky mist, casting swirling grey contours upon the ocean landscape and over their achromatic skin.

The pair of figures huddled silently, shoulder-to-shoulder, attention gathered upon a point lost in the expanse of a surreal horizon. In the embrace of darkness, caressed by a bitter draft that raised the sands and cascaded through their clothes, they were the only entities that emitted warmth, and gladly, they relished in each other's presence. Their breathing found harmony with the oscillation of waves; a monotonous yet arcane motion that spoke of dreariness and reflected their situation back at them like a hazy, volatile mirror.

The glowering depths spoke of a miserable lack of reasoning, of crudeness and uncertainty, of morality fused with desire and survivability and insanity lurking within volumes of desperation, wrought jagged with despair. The cruelty of the oceanic vista had been painted over with thick, dark, mesmerising echoes of blue and grey, a vividness that swelled and punctuated their sights until they were sick with their twisted realities.

The coastline was a mystifying, gracious thing to behold, and the longer they drank in the sights, the more pungent the calamity inflicted upon the mind's eye. The deeper they drew the coursing ocean air into the starved pits of their lungs, the more suffocating the salt that coagulated against the raw rim of their windpipes on its horrid descent.

Of utter sorrow, of hopeless dread, the two figures sat idly in the company of the glorious ocean landscape, and let their surroundings kill them slowly.

Slowly. Slowly.

"_Hajime."_

A pair of ashen xanthous irises emerged from under lowered lashes- he did not remember closing his tired eyes from his environment. Under renewed exposure, a dulled sense of aching despondency set in. To the unsettling call of his name, to the shudder of the adjacent shoulder as its possessor murmured beside him, he made no blatant response. He merely waited, and the articulator understood, the stillness once again ruptured like shears through the fabric of silence, the gentle crash of the waves reduced to a thoughtless nothing.

"_What do you think, Hajime, is the best way to die?"_

His breathy words are lone daggers in the night, shredding apart the last of their serenities until the glamour lay as tortured ribbons in the grit surrounding them. There came no answer for a short while, but in that same moment, he dipped his almost-translucent fingers in the sand, biting his fingernails into granular quartz, gradually cupping the fickle material. A twist of his wrist and he raised his relaxed palm upwards, steadily, at a sleight until the particle mass began to escape his mockery of a hold, surging towards the ground in effortless, wraithlike rivulets.

"**Slowly, gracefully, like a quiet wind, soft and considerate so you don't scar those people that were close to you. So peacefully, your body would look as though it were sleeping. Dead, but only just."**

Jaded hoary irises smothered in the dark, following the last of the piling sand with an illusory intensity, as though the senseless shift served as the answer he'd so patiently sought after. The verbal response, seemingly ignored, was layered so heavily with consideration that it set his tongue still. When his pallid eyes drifted away, towards the fathomless ocean, he was lapsed in comprehension, a faded imagination. When he spoke again, it was with a wistful undertone, resigned.

"_I'd like to die like that too, but…_

"_I'm not sure that's possible for someone like me."_

The shades of a smile captured the other's lips; it was a sad, lonely smile, to match his companion's.

"**I know."**

He turns his head in a slow, drawn out motion, meeting the other's receptive gaze and staring into the broiling mass of a subtle, murky psychosis. The callous edge to his eyes is softened heavily with a deceptive affability, with polite personal curiosities. The eyes are doe-like, unblinking, and he holds them, unable to avert his stare.

There's something exquisite about those soft stormy-grey eyes, but he fears the waiting moment when they lose their iridescent sheen, closing to the world like he does from the sea.

Your death will be the hurricane that'll tear my heart to bits.

"**But Nagito, you can still hope."**


End file.
